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A green light to oppression

Brian Whitaker

July 31, 2007 1:30 PM

In a move supposedly intended to counter Iranian influence, the US has announced a series of arms deals with Middle Eastern countries.

Apart from Israel, which will receive $30bn in military aid, Egypt will get $13bn. Five Gulf states - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE - will also be sold weaponry to the tune of $20bn, with the lion's share going to the Wahhabi regime in Riyadh.

Thus, in the name of "working with these states to fight back extremism" (as secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put it), the US is arming two of the Arab world's leading human rights abusers: Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The reaction from Tehran was predictable. US policy "is creating fear and concerns in the countries of the region and trying to harm the good relations between these countries", foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran. And he's absolutely right.

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

In Egypt, the tiny Shia population is already harassed by the authorities and treated with suspicion. Some of this has been documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Its report talks of Shia Muslims being arrested - ostensibly for security reasons - but then being subjected to torrents of abuse by state security officers for their religious beliefs.

One officer is quoted as telling a suspect: "I'm going to keep tabs on you. If you try anything, I'll make you regret it. I'm prepared to forgive the members of the Gamaa'a Islamiyya [the armed Sunni Islamist group], although they murder us, but I wouldn't forgive you, because at least the Gamaa'a Islamiyya shares my creed."

In Saudi Arabia, where Shia account for 20% of the population (and, more critically, 75% in the oil-rich region), the official policy, as Matthew Mainen of the Institute for Gulf Affairs noted recently, is to treat them as polytheists, idol worshippers, and as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy against Islam.

"Matching the indoctrination of Saudi Arabia's public education system, governmental practices and policies reinforce the notion that Shia Muslims are subhuman. Shia books, education, music, and art are banned in Saudi Arabia. Shias are further barred from playing any political, social, or religious role in Saudi society, and are not even allowed to provide testimony in courts of law ...

"As long as Saudi Arabia continues to promote and practise an ideology holding that it is the obligation of Sunni Muslims to purge Islam of Shias in the great jihad, hundreds of Saudi insurgents will continue to cross the Iraqi border to further the sectarian violence without hindrance from the Saudi security forces."

As the US state department itself has observed in a report on religious freedom in the kingdom:

"Members of the Shia minority are subject to officially sanctioned political and economic discrimination ...

"Members of the Shia minority are discriminated against in government employment, especially in national security-related positions, such as in the military or Ministry of Interior. While there are some Shia who occupy high-level positions in government-owned companies and government agencies, many Shia believe that openly identifying themselves as Shia would have a negative impact on career advancement ... While there is no formal policy concerning the hiring and promotion of Shia, anecdotal evidence suggests that in some companies -including companies in the oil and petrochemical industries - well-qualified Shia are passed over for less-qualified Sunni compatriots ...

"The Government also discriminates against Shia in higher education through unofficial restrictions on the number of Shia admitted to universities."

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Bread graft taxes Egypt's poorest

Officials say corruption is worsening a wheat shortage. Government-subsidized flour, meant for poor Egyptians, is often sold on the black market.
By Jill Carroll | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO

Every day throughout this largely poor city, throngs of Cairenes scramble to get their share of government-subsidized bread.

Each person can buy as many as 20 pieces. And when the bakeries begin running low, the crowds begin growing restless. In many bakeries in the city's impoverished quarters, bakers have already built cages to protect them from customers not known for their patience.

Now that the country is facing a wheat shortage, parliamentarians are worried that cheap bread for the poor may become even more scarce.

But Hamdan Taha, first prime minister for supplies at the Ministry for Social Solidarity, says this problem has little to do with the wheat shortfall and everything to do with corruption.

If people weren't selling cut-rate government flour on the black market, "we could have a large amount of flour," says Mr. Taha.

As central as bread is to life here, so too is corruption in the subsidized flour system. Many public bakeries, which receive cut-rate flour from the government, sell their flour on the black market to private bakeries. To compensate for the lack of ingredients, the public bakeries, who cater to the poor, often make bread smaller and lighter and sometimes simply bake less.

One sack of subsidized flour costs about 16 Egyptian pounds, or almost $3. A sack on the black market fetches almost ten times as much.

To cheat the system, black market flour dealers sometimes bribe bakery inspectors, who work for low state wages, say sources in the government.

Members of Egypt's Parliament demanded this week that an emergency session be held to discuss the wheat shortage. Shortfalls in wheat imports caused a spike in demand and private bakeries (which cater to the country's middle and upper classes) have been buying up much of what is on the market, leaving government wheat inventories short, according to the independent newspaper Ad-Dustour. Parliament is on a break until November.

The government has tried some measures to stop the corruption, including tougher laws against corruption at bakeries last year and a proposal for a separate distribution system. But old habits have proven hard to break. Flour corruption, in tandem with a growing population, a shortage of public bakeries in poor areas, widespread poverty, and fluctuations in wheat production lead to periodic bread shortages particularly in poor neighborhoods.

A 2001 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington said corruption meant about 28 percent of wheat flour was lost to the black market. That along with subsidies on bread and other food distributed equally regardless of income meant only about a third of subsidy benefits go to the truly needy.

Inside a public bakery in the poor Al Waaili neighborhood, a veteran baker – eyelashes to trousers dusted in government-subsidized flour – points to a yellowed and crumbling notice on a column.

"It says make sure all the 30 [sacks of flour] are used for the bread. The government bakeries, they are selling this flour," says the baker, who only gave his name as Sayid and crows with pride that they don't sell their flour on the black market.

"But it's just the truth," he says as his boss tries to quiet him from disparaging other bakeries.

"It's common, but [done] in a very secret way," says Samir Gamal Abdel Salim who runs Grand Bake, an upscale private bakery. Public bakeries, he says, pile the sacks of flour in big trucks or cars at night and drive them to their black market customers.

"It's much easier for them to sell this flour rather than making bread. They are selling this flour to any bakery and they will get profit without any effort, and a lot of profit. But [black marketeers have] to be very careful," he says.

He said the private bakeries mix in the lesser quality subsidized flour with the regular flour so customers, paying a premium, don't notice the difference.

"I prefer if there is no subsidy at all and they use the subsidy in another field, because this subsidy is for bad people to get rich," says the tall, lanky owner of the public bakery in Al Waaili who asked his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject. He says government inspectors sent to weigh and measure the bread are often bribed.

Politicians learned their lesson about trying to reduce the expensive subsidy 30 years ago. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat tried to reduce subsidies on some foods including some bread and flour in 1977, sparking riots that threatened the stability of his government and the proposal was quickly withdrawn. Since then, debate about Egypt's subsidies has centered on how to more equitably distribute them, not do away with them.

Abu Somaa ekes out a living from several jobs and lives on subsidized food. He works a government factory job during the day and at a private bakery in the Al Waaili at night, selling bread he could never afford. He uses a nickname because he says it's illegal to have a government job and another job. He is afraid he will lose the bakery job that earns him a crucial extra $3.50 a day.

He hands out bread at the bakery counter and during lulls in his 12-hour shift, piles bread atop a wooden lattice longer than he is, balances it on his head, and rides a bicycle a few blocks away to sell it at a meager profit.

"This is my [work] and [it was] my father's work," he says, next to the bakery as the sunset call to prayer floats down on the tiny side street among donkey carts, tumbled-down buildings, and men sipping tiny glasses of coffee at rickety tables in a cafe in a rubble strewn lot.

"Life is very hard. There are lots of people like this. So many people don't have enough money. They are doing this rather than becoming criminals," he says.

Gamal Fouad Naguib, a sugar company employee, bends down in a narrow alley by a busy public bakery, sorting his hot, subsidized bread on newspaper on the ground to cool.

"My salary is not enough to buy the bread [at the private bakeries]," so he comes here everyday or so to collect his 20 pieces of bread for about 17 cents. But on the days he works late and public bakeries have either run out or closed down, he has to go to the private bakeries that are at least four times as much.

While Mr. Taha, says corruption is "the main problem," he then back peddled, perhaps sensing the sensitivity of the issue, "There's no problem, no problem... It's not a lot. It's not a real problem. Just some people doing this who [are] very weak and they sell it, but it's not a huge problem," he says.

Best of cartman

Father-to-be allowed into delivery room for first time in Iran

Robert Tait in Tehran Monday July 23, 2007 Guardian It has become a fixture of modern medical practice: women giving birth in the comforting presence of the father-to-be. Now a custom long seen as a sign of western social progress is being adopted in the conservative setting of Iran as doctors seek to wean the country's women off their preference for caesarean births. Sarem hospital in Tehran last week became the first in Iran to allow a father inside a delivery room for the birth of his child. The hospital is offering couples the chance to stay together during childbirth after being told that it is permissible under Iran's Islamic laws. What has become common practice in the west is still unknown in Iran, where pregnancy and birth are still seen as women's business. But Dr Abutaleb Sarem, a western-trained specialist obstetrician and medical director at Sarem hospital, is urging patients to bring in husbands for health and psychological reasons. He believes the presence of fathers is necessary to soothe women's nerves and make them more willing to give birth naturally. Dr Sarem came up with the proposal after Iran's health ministry asked doctors to reduce the number of caesarean births. About 70% of babies in Iran are born by caesarean section, largely due to women's fears about the pain of childbirth and the worry that natural births make them less attractive to their husbands. Dr Sarem said the fears about pain could be eased by fathers attending the births. "Our hospital advertised that we had all the latest facilities to make natural childbirth painless but patients were still insisting on caesareans, despite the high risks of infection and serious side-effects," he told the Guardian. "I remembered that when I worked in Austria and Germany, women were forgetting about the pain when their husbands were present at the births. The atmosphere in delivery rooms seemed so peaceful and I wondered if it was because the fathers were there. So I offered it to the husband of one of my patients. "He agreed after we asked if it was religiously permissible and were told that it was. We gave the mother a low epidural. The environment was very spiritual and friendly, with husband and wife laughing and joking. The mother was able to help the medical team a little and delivered the baby, a girl, without great discomfort. The husband was emotional and in tears." Caesareans were traditionally frowned upon in Iran as a sign of ill-health and weakness, but they have become more popular since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

This time it's personal

Alastair Harper July 24, 2007 12:00 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/alastair_harper/2007/07/this_time_its_personal.html Our privacy is a farce. As you read this, the cute bod you met last night has found your Facebook profile and is sniggering at the photo of you, aged 16, looking an idiot at an Ibiza foam party while lifting a delighted alcopop to the camera. You'd told them you were a Rhodes scholar. Your number has already been deleted from their phone. The Sun is now able to do odd little stories about a policeman being homosexual and, dear Lord, actually admitting to it on his Facebook profile. They justify the story by saying he was recently promoted in the Transport Police - meaning he now might guard high-profile passengers, So if, say, the Queen were to catch the Central line to Bethnal Green in order to have a look around Whitechapel market, he might possibly be one of her many guards. The issue, according to the Sun, is that his profile has made him a target for terrorists. And he is gay. Oxford University can now use the pictures put up by friends of some poor Bullingdon sap burning peasant villages and discipline him. Or congratulate him, I'm not quite sure how it works up there. It's amazing how much easier the internet has made it for fools to be foolish. Intrigued as to Facebook's ability to find friends through your email username, I managed to accidentally ask everyone I had ever emailed to be my friend. Everyone. Imagine it was your job to very occasionally interview quite important people and so have email contact with them. Imagine what you'd feel like when you asked cabinet ministers or an elderly and very respected playwright to join you on, of all things, Facebook. Meanwhile there are infuriating little applications trying to extract every bit of data they can for their marketing departments, hiding under the guise of turning you into a zombie or inviting you to cyber-kick someone in the jaw. I remember working for an internet company and coming up with these sorts of things: made in half an hour to hook stupid people into revealing all their information for no reward other than getting a little profile of their dog. The thing is, any social networking site is completely pointless for keeping in touch with friends. You don't socially network, anyway. That implies some cyber cocktail party where you see someone else is a fan of both the Television Personalities and Knut Hamsun and start a wonderful relationship before moving on to the chap that has also flagged his interest in Joseph Priestly and the Holy Modal Rounders. In reality, the only thing you do is receive requests from the people you hated at school and weigh up in your head if it's worth having them being able to look at your life in exchange for you having a good nose around theirs. Keep your fingers crossed - they might have a crack addiction. Actually I might be wrong about a choice when it comes to adding someone. There seem to be strange etiquette rules that I don't quite understand. I was once called "extremely petty" and thoroughly told off by several friends for denying a request from someone that I was very open (especially to him) about disliking. They were also very open about disliking him too, but they had not refused to add him. The idea that I want as few people as possible to be able to report me to the Sun when suspicious photos of me playing with a police truncheon go up just doesn't seem to occur to them. The last thing I want to have happen is what occurred to two of my friends last week. Having been happily engaged for the last few years and, apparently, looking forward to their wedding in late summer I logged into Facebook to see a little gif of a broken heart and the casual announcement that x and y are no longer engaged. It must be some sort of electronic glitch, I thought. But a click on the former affianced's profile showed her receiving cyber hugs from various members of her ex-beau's family. In fact it was how his family found out. Phonecalls surged from America and the Middle East as cousins alerted their non-information age fathers to the sudden change in their nephew's life. So for the last week traditional Muslim patriarchs have been calling him every few days to have a little conversation about how he chooses to take out internet advertisements before telling his family. Once the phone stops ringing he intends to delete his profile.

America's North-West Frontier fantasy

Declan Walsh

July 24, 2007 11:30 AM

A perplexing twist in Washington's "war on terror" has occurred. For over two years the White House has stoutly defended the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf's, record on combating Islamist extremism, even as a cyclone of Taliban terror ran through the tribal belt. But now, when Musharraf is finally starting to act - ordering the Red Mosque siege three weeks ago, deploying fresh troops to North West Frontier Province, and rallying Pakistan for a potential civil war against militants - Washington has suddenly decided he's not going fast enough. In fact it seems to be seriously considering war.

Six years after dropping troops into Afghanistan, Washington seems to believe it invaded the wrong country. A cascade of ever-tougher statements have created the impression that unilateral mlitary action against targets inside Pakistan is looming. First then the National Intelligence Estimate pinpointed the tribal areas as al-Qaida's global headquarters and warned that it was putting the US at risk. Then President Bush declared that Musharraf's efforts to broker peace in the same area had miserably failed. Finally his homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, said that "no options are off the table" to solve the problem - including military action.

Trigger-happy Democrats chimed in enthusiastically. Whatever rock "those evil people" were hiding under, crowed the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, "we should go get them".

It's not only politicians who are baying for bombs. A Washington Post editorial last week called for "targeted strikes or covert actions" inside Pakistan. The influential New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared she "had it up the Wazir with Waziristan" and called on a few good "Army Rangers or Navy Seals" to take care of business.

This sabre-rattling is ill-informed, dangerous and counter-productive. Certainly President Musharraf and his devious intelligence agencies have an ambiguous approach to the Taliban. But this must not be confused with the situation on the ground where, since the Red Mosque siege ended on July 11, Islamists have launched a blistering onslaught against government forces. The only thing guaranteed to rouse the fire-breathing mullahs even more is the prospect - however remote - of an American invasion.

And what would an American war in Waziristan look like? A full-scale invasion is unthinkable unless the US intends to topple Musharraf and create a second Iraq. They could go for targeted strikes - but in fact they already are. American Predator drones have been secretly hitting al-Qaida hideouts across the tribal areas for at least two years; to save itself political embarrassment Islamabad claims responsibility.

The military's last tactic is commando raids - a tactic the US has employed across the border in Afghanistan for the past six years with limited success. How would the same Special Forces, operating in a treacherous mountainous environment with hardly a friend, do any better in Waziristan?

Of course the rocket-propelled talk may be simply a ploy to make Musharraf push faster and harder against his troublesome tribesmen and their al-Qaida guests. If so, it's a risky gambit. At best the threats will deepen anti-Americanism and the perception that Musharraf is Bush's "poodle". At worst they will further destabilise the Pakistani state at an immensely fragile time. Musharraf is politically weak and his forces are at war in pockets of the Frontier. The suicide bombing - a device previously reserved for presidential assassination bids - has become a thrice-daily occurrence. No matter how much Washington exhorts him to "do more", Musharraf may reaching the limits of his power.

This is partly the Bush administration's own doing. Since 2001 it has propped up Musharraf with $10bn in aid and endless diplomatic cover-fire, free of cost. The price has been paid in terms of numerous distortions of politics and society - political alliances between Musharraf and the mullahs, a castrated parliament and, most recently, surging anti-military feeling. It was no coincidence that as triumphant lawyers tumbled out of the supreme court last Friday - after the victory of the chief justice, Muhammad Iftikhar Chaudhry, against Musharraf - that some also chanted anti-American slogans.

But even if Musharraf's sell-by date is approaching, American bombs are no solution. Success against bin Laden and his chums at their "terrorist mountain spa", as Ms Dowd puts it, is inextricably linked to solving the problems of the tribal areas themselves. The scheming tribesmen have survived on the outer margins of the Pakistani state since independence in 1947. Now, by whatever means possible - greater political freedoms, more schooling or just old-fashioned bribery - they must be brought into the fold. Few consider America a friend; but not all need to see it as the enemy.

Some American officials already know this. Before the latest hard talk they announced a $750m aid package for the tribal belt. The plan attracted some criticism, notably about tricky issues like corruption and finding projects that won't get blown up. But the broad alternative looks much worse. American military action in Pakistan now could plunge the country into turmoil, swamp its beleaguered democratic forces and fail to yield the terrorist scalps Washington is looking for. In fact it would likely create many more.

No bloodless revolution

Turkey's election may point the way to further democratisation, but the army means to block it Maureen Freely Tuesday July 24, 2007 The Guardian When Turkey went to the polls at the weekend, it was, according to the headlines, fighting for its soul. Which would it choose, Islam or secularism? But that was never the real contest. The key issue was democracy - would the Turkish electorate again endorse a secular system that has, since its inception, been enforced by the military? Or would it signal that the time had come to let the people govern themselves? This was their message on Sunday, when they returned the mildly Islamist AK party to power with 47% of the vote. That they could do so at all is a victory for democracy. But it is not at all clear who will have the final say. A few words, then, on Turkish secularism. In 1923, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk pulled Turkey from its Islamic roots to establish a western-style republic, one of his first acts was to shut down the dervish lodges. He went on to "nationalise" religion. To this day, clerics are state employees. When he replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, his aim was to increase the literacy rate - but he also knew that, before long, most Turks would be unable to read the Qur'an, or indeed any version of their history that he and his successors did not endorse. A pretty amazing achievement. It is unlikely that he could have done the same by democratic means. This has long been the refrain of the generals and those secularists who put their trust in them. Turkey's democracy is young, they say. Unsupervised, it will go back to its old ways. To keep it on the true path, the army has rolled in its tanks three times in the past 50 years. A decade ago, it successfully organised a tank-free intervention - what has come to be known as the post-modern coup. In spring, it staged an "e-coup", issuing on its website a "press release" warning it would intervene if the ruling AK party continued to Islamicise the state. The big fight then was about the presidency. The prime minister's candidate was Abdullah Gul, who had once been less mildly Islamist and whose wife wears a headscarf. But as foreign minister he took Turkey towards Europe. He has worked hard to keep the accession project afloat and his colleagues in Europe hold him in high esteem. Some in the army see this as stage one of a dastardly plan. By taking Turkey into Europe, the secretly fundamentalist AK party would emasculate the military, paving the way for an Islamist counter-revolution. There is no evidence that AK has such ambitions, or that Turkey - which overwhelmingly supports the separation of religion and state - would endorse such a project. But the military will want to curb and supervise the newly re-elected government, and there are fears that if that doesn't work, it will find an excuse to shut it down - thus "saving" it not just from Islam, but also from Europe. There are those who say the army cannot afford to stage a full-size coup. Having refused to play along in Iraq, it can no longer depend on its usual sponsor, the US. It has its own internal, though largely unreported, power struggles. And it is disinclined to take action without first manufacturing consent. But this it would seem to have done. Since 2005, the media has run a hate campaign against those it deems traitors. It has, in addition to reigniting the Kurdish issue, championed the ultranationalist lawyers who have prosecuted more than 100 journalists, writers, publishers, academics and activists for "insulting Turkishness". They have convinced the public that these "traitors" have sold the country to Europe to advance their careers. Few of their targets are Islamists. Meanwhile, the nation's mayors compete to prove who is the most patriotic. Istanbul is so thick with flags you can hardly see the skyline. Nothing stays still for long in Turkey, however. The economy is booming. During the AK party's five years in power there has been steady growth. For this it has won the approval of the secularist business world. Many in the liberal intelligentsia - secularists who are repelled by the nationalist rhetoric of Ataturk's old party the CHP and disturbed by the rise of the ultra-nationalist MHP - gave their votes to the AK party. At grassroots level there is abundant evidence that Islam and secularism can co-exist productively, as can Turkey and Europe. Even Turks and Kurds. But it's not going to be easy with an army this strong and this determined to block change. If democratisation continues, it is unlikely to be bloodless. · Maureen Freely is the author of Enlightenment maureen.freely@warwick.ac.uk

The silent majority

The extremists marching in Jerusalem last night were by no means representative of the Israeli mainstream, so why was there no counter-protest?

July 24, 2007

Last time I wrote about Nadia Matar, her response was to brand Josh and me as "Palestinian agents". She fired off a mass email to her acolytes, to this effect, calling for them to be vigilant against our espionage. Ignoring the thinly veiled threats she'd made against us, we headed back into her lair again last night and witnessed what happens when Nadia is allowed to pull the strings of a few thousand puppets in the heart of Jerusalem.

Her Women In Green organisation was behind yesterday's march round the Old City of Jerusalem. The march is an annual event that coincides with Tisha Ba'av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. By fasting, and reading the Book of Lamentations, Jews around the world commemorate the series of tragedies connected with this date that have engulfed the Jewish people over the centuries (including the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsion from Spain and the Holocaust).

However, subdued mourning and introspection do not appeal to Nadia Matar and her merry men. Instead, they hijack the event in order to stick the boot in to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem by way of their inflammatory march.

It is, to all intents and purposes, the Mediterranean equivalent of the Orange Order parade in Drumcree. Even the colours are the same, thanks to the presence of the anti-disengagement crowd whose orange T-shirts and flags bear their latest, shamelessly sectarian slogan, "The Land of Israel for the People of Israel". Two thousand people gathered in Kikar Safra, West Jerusalem, where Nadia worked herself and the crowd into a frenzy, stalking round the square in her trademark green baseball cap while preaching her message of hate and war through a microphone.

I asked a passing demonstrator if he was worried that the Arabs might react badly to such an incendiary march, but was reassured that "they know better than to mess with a crowd this big". He strode off into the distance, while Josh, Alex and I debated the wisdom of our three-man Cif cell spending the next two hours in such delectable company. Trying to spot Nadia in the crowd before she clocked us was like playing a real-life game of Where's Wally, and in this furtive manner we made our way down to Damascus Gate to begin the parade.

The roads were cordoned off and manned by a huge police presence, meaning that the protesters were free to strut their stuff as provocatively as they liked - and they did. One burly man, dressed in sackcloth in honour of the occasion, spotted a group of Arab youths on the other side of the road, and purposefully stormed over to wave his flag in their faces as he smirked triumphantly. Resisting the urge to connect my right fist to his temple (first or second - either would do), I decided instead to approach my new friend and casually enquire as to what he hoped to achieve with his actions.

In a booming American accent, Eliyahu told me "I don't hate them, I just want them to understand that they can only live here under Jewish rule." As I struggled to keep up with his frantic pacing, I asked him whether he thought this method of getting his message across was likely to do more harm than good in terms of Judaeo-Arab relations. He exploded like a cluster bomb. "Look," he screamed, "I don't care whether they like it or not. They need to understand that they lost the war; we won, they lost. Why it's taken them 40 years to get the picture I don't know, but we're not going to stop until they understand who's in control."

Warming to his theme, he went on to deride "the chutzpah that the Arabs have - they demand that we can't even live in their midst and want us to withdraw. You're from England, so answer me this - what if all the Pakistanis in England said we don't want any whites living in our area, they've all got to go? What would you say to that?"

For all his incendiary posing, Eliyahu was by no means a major player at an event like this. That accolade belongs to the rightwing member of Knesset, Arieh Eldad, whose firebrand speech in front of his adoring audience was as frightening as it was surreal. With the walls of the Old City lit up behind him in a fluorescent glow, he bellowed out his message: "We must take back the Temple Mount, if we are to avoid another Churban [Destruction] befalling the Jewish People. We are doomed unless we bring in a strong Jewish leader to rule a land which is meant for Jews, a land which is not meant for Arabs." He left the stage to thunderous applause, the crowd lapping up his battle cry and hanging on his every word.

What disturbed me most about the entire evening of marching and sabre-rattling was not the protesters themselves, since our recent trip has left me rather immune to their ranting and raving by now. Instead, it was the absence of counter-protest by fellow Israelis who knew this event was going ahead, yet were either too apathetic or too intimidated to do anything to stand up to the fascist face of the Israeli far right.

When I was young, my parents would regularly take me on anti-NF rallies at Trafalgar Square. They instilled a firm belief in me that standing by and doing nothing makes you (almost) complicit in the crime itself. The extremists marching round the Old City last night are by no means representative of the Israeli mainstream, but they're far better organised, far more passionate, and far more prepared for action than any other section of society here.

With the likes of Nadia Matar and Arieh Eldad at the helm, an event like last night should send an urgent warning to their opponents that it's time to stand up and show the world that this type of hate will not be tolerated.

The insurgents' achilles heel

Sami Ramadani July 20, 2007 8:30 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sami_ramadani/2007/07/the_insurgents_achilles_heel.html Yesterday's Guardian report on armed resistance organisations in Iraq and their plans to form a political front was a fresh and illuminating snapshot of the most dangerous and far-reaching conflict of our times. By eschewing the usual cliches and bundles of distortions about any Muslims bearing arms, the report enriches our understanding of the best organised of the resistance groups active in parts of Baghdad and the areas up to and including Mosul, north of the capital. What they say indicates a major shift in tactics and strategy, but also reveals these groups' achilles heels. Politically, one of the most telling statements was from the spokesperson of a faction of the Ansar al-Sunna resistance group: "Resistance isn't just about killing Americans without any aims or goals ... Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing - fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy. They [al-Qaida] believe that all Shia are kuffar [unbelievers]- and most of the Sunnis as well ... The Americans magnify their role, even though they are responsible for a minority of resistance operations - remember that the Americans brought al-Qaida to Iraq." The statement is significant in two respects. One is the fact that al-Qaida is being denounced openly, and the second is that the man making the statement is from Ansar al-Sunna, one the organisations that gained notoriety in its indiscriminate methods of fighting and sectarian ideology. Equally significant is the fact that the other faction of Ansar al-Sunna is being accused of working with al-Qaida. One of the least sectarian of the seven groups forming the new alliance is the 1920 Revolution Brigades, whose leader, Harith al-Dhari, was assassinated recently by al-Qaida, according to Muthanna al-Thari, spokesperson of the very influential Association of Muslim Scholars. The leader of the AMS, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, is the assassinated leader's uncle and the most influential of the anti-occupation Sunni cleric. Reversing earlier statements, Sheikh Dhari, has also become very critical of al-Qaida. His and other recent anti al-Qaida statements are fuelled by the enormous loathing that Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities have for al-Qaida and all sectarian attacks. Indeed, popular opinion in the streets of Iraq habitually accuse the occupation of backing al-Qaida to spread sectarian divisions and split the struggle against the occupation. The seven groups are not only anti al-Qaida but also keen to distance themselves from the Saddamist wing of the Ba'ath party, led by Izz'at al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's deputy until the 2003 invasion. Such political credentials should in theory make the task of unity with Muqtada Sadr's movement less difficult. However, the resistance leaders who talked to the Guardian accuse Sadr's Mahdi army of sectarian killings while ignoring the fact that most of the sectarian attacks have been aimed at Sadr City, Najaf, Kufa and Karbala. For his part, Sadr has conceded that his movement has been infiltrated by its enemies, including the occupation authorities. Referring to the climate of chaos and occupation presence, Sadrist spokesmen have often referred to "the ease with which sectarian crimes could be committed by anyone wearing black and claiming to be from the Mahdi army." Following the second attack on the Samarra Shia shrine, Sadr accused the occupation of being behind the attack - a position echoed by Sunni clergy and secular forces - and stressed unity with Sunnis. He later accused the US of sabotaging his attempts to unite with Sunnis. While it obviously suits the US to divide the opposition to its occupation of the country, Sadr's own tactics are attacked for being one of the biggest obstacles to greater anti-occupation unity. These tactics include on-off participation in the government and the Sadrists' presence in parliament (in the sect-based Coalition List that won most of the seats in the January 2006 occupation-controlled elections). Though some of the criticisms of Iranian policies by the resistance leaders interviewed by the Guardian are based in fact, the seven groups' hostility to Iran is still trapped within the old Saddamist-style anti-Iranian chauvinism that fuelled his eight-year war against Iran following the 1979 overthrow of the US-backed Shah regime. Racist propaganda against the Iranian people lasted for a quarter of a century and permeated Iraqi society and its educational system. The US-led propaganda campaign against Iran has thus fallen on receptive ears. The US is happy to see Iraqis directing their wrath against the fictitious "presence of hundreds of thousands of Iranians fighting alongside the US forces to evict Sunnis from Baghdad and replace them with Shia" - in the words of one Iraqi victim of the occupation who, with her daughter, was forced to leave Iraq after the murder of her brother. The seven resistance groups don't appear to be facing up to the fact that effectively by far the biggest organised armed resistance group in Iraq is Sadr's Mahdi army, estimated to be well over 100,000 strong - or that, in the absence of strong non-religious anti-occupation organisations, millions of people across Iraq are supporters of Muqtada Sadr's anti-occupation message. US jets and helicopters are daily bombarding Sadr City in Baghdad and towns south of Baghdad. Thousands of Sadrists are in jail and the US is acutely aware that the Sadrists remain one of the biggest obstacles to controlling Iraq. Last but not least, when talking about the resistance in Iraq it's important to remember that most of the thousands of military operations that the Pentagon reports are carried out monthly against the occupation forces go unclaimed by any organisation. This confirms the impression that I and many Iraqis have that most of the armed resistance to the occupation is conducted by localised groups in the villages and cities of Iraq. Armed resistance to the occupation has much deeper and more popular roots than the politicians in Washington and London dare to admit. For admitting it, at least in public, means abandoning their much trumpeted "exit strategy", otherwise known as having your cake and eating it. Having a pro US government in Baghdad, withdrawing most of the troops but keeping military bases in Iraq is not what Iraqis mean by ending the military and economic occupation of Iraq. Such an exit strategy will not stop the resistance and the sea of popular support that feeds and protects it. For even those who are engaged in anti-occupation political and trade union activities in Iraq do not hide their support for the "al-muqawama al-sharifa" ("the honourable resistance" as distinct from terrorism). And it is these deep Iraqi roots which are likely, sooner or later, to produce the united front that rises above the differences based on religion or ethnicity. A slogan gaining momentum in the streets of Iraq reflects this popular mood:"La lil ihtilal; la lil ta'iffia; la lil irhab": "No to the occupation; no to sectarianism; no to terrorism."

Conquest of Egypt

Welcome to Richistan, USA

The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality. But a backlash is brewing, reports Paul Harris in New York Paul Harris in New York Sunday July 22, 2007 Observer On the surface, Mark Cain works for a time-share company. Members pay a one-off sum to join and an annual fee. They then get to book holiday time in various destinations around the globe. But Solstice clients are not ordinary people. They are America's super-rich and a brief glance at its operations reveal the vast and still widening gulf between them and the rest of America. Solstice has only about 80 members. Platinum membership costs them $875,000 to join and then a $42,000 annual fee. In return they get access to 10 homes from London to California and a private yacht in the Caribbean, all fully staffed with cooks, cleaners and 'lifestyle managers' ready to satisfy any whim from helicopter-skiing to audiences with local celebrities. As the firm's marketing manager, Cain knows what Solstice's clientele want. 'We are trying to feed and manage this insatiable appetite for luxury,' Cain said with pride. America's super-rich have returned to the days of the Roaring Twenties. As the rest of the country struggles to get by, a huge bubble of multi-millionaires lives almost in a parallel world. The rich now live in their own world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and their own banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts. Their world now has a name, thanks to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank which has dubbed it 'Richistan'. There every dream can come true. But for the American Dream itself - which promises everyone can join the elite - the emergence of Richistan is a mixed blessing. 'We in America are heading towards 'developing nation' levels of inequality. We would become like Brazil. What does that say about us? What does that say about America?' Frank said. In 1985 there were just 13 US billionaires. Now there are more than 1,000. In 2005 the US saw 227,000 new millionaires being created. One survey showed that the wealth of all US millionaires was $30 trillion, more than the GDPs of China, Japan, Brazil, Russia and the EU combined. The rich have now created their own economy for their needs, at a time when the average worker's wage rises will merely match inflation and where 36 million people live below the poverty line. In Richistan sums of money are rendered almost meaningless because of their size. It also has other names. There is the 'Platinum Triangle' used to describe the slice of Beverly Hills where many houses go for above $10m. Then there is the Jewel Coast, used to describe the strip of Madison Avenue in Manhattan where boutique jewellery stories have sprung up to cater for the new riches' needs. Or it exists in the MetCircle society, a Manhattan club open only to those whose net worth is at least $100m. The reason behind the sudden wealth boom is, according to some experts, the convergence of a new technology - the internet and other computing advances - with fluid and speculative markets. It was the same in the late 19th century when the original Gilded Age of conspicuous wealth and deep poverty was spawned by railways and the industrial age. At the same time government has helped by doling out corporate tax breaks. In the Fifties the proportion of federal income from company taxes was 33 per cent, by 2003 it was just 7.4 percent. Some 82 of America's largest companies paid no tax at all in at least one of the first three years of the administration of President George W Bush. But who are the new rich? Some of the names are familiar, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates and savvy stock investor Warren Buffett. But most are unknown, often springing from the secretive world of financial hedge funds. Men like James Simons, who took home compensation of $1.7bn last year. Last year the 25 top earning hedge fund bankers in the US earned an average of $570m each. The average US household income is $50,000. It is such men - and they are usually men - who feed the outlandish luxury goods economy of Richistan. It is they who are responsible for the rebirth of the butler industry, which was all but dead in the Seventies and is now facing a shortage of trained staff. So keen is the demand that many can expect to earn a six-figure salary when they graduate from booming butler schools. Then there is the runaway feeder-industry of luxury consumer items. The new ultra rich turn up their noses at Rolexes; the sought-after brand is Franck Muller, which sells a high-end timepiece for $736,000. Or try a Mont Blanc pen, encrusted in jewels, for $700,000. Louis Vuitton's most exclusive handbag sells for $42,000. Only 24 were ever made and none ever touched a shelf as all were pre-sold to Richistani clients. In places such as Manhattan and Los Angeles, restaurants and bars outdo themselves in excess. New York's Algonquin Hotel has a $10,000 'martini on a rock' (it comes with a diamond at the bottom of the glass). City eateries sell burgers for more than $50. One offers a $1,000 omelette. In Los Angeles there is a craze for Bling mineral water - at $90 a bottle. Then there are the boats. The private yacht industry in America has been caught in an arms race of size and luxuriousness. So far, there has been a clear winner: Oracle-founder Larry Ellison's 450ft water palace, the Rising Sun. More than 80 rooms on five storeys and a landing craft that carries a Jeep, a basketball court doubling as a helipad and a fully-equipped cinema. Now an Oregon-based company is taking things further: private submarines. An estimated 100 or so private subs are now drifting around the world's oceans. Then there are the rockets - several notable billionaires are now leading the way in private exploration of space. One of them is Robert Bigelow who has ploughed $500m into trying to build an inflatable space hotel. A miniature prototype model was successfully launched and tested last month. In a scene that perhaps James Bond would find familiar, armed guards now patrol the fences of Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters wearing badges decorated with an alien as their corporate logo. But this is not just a world of riches gone mad that the rest of America can ignore. The growth of such a large super-rich class, coupled with a deepening poverty in many communities, is starting to tear at the fabric of society. Even some of the most wealthy - like Gates and Buffett - have spoken openly of the needs to address the massive 'inequality gap' that they have come to exemplify. In effect, some of the very richest Americans are calling for themselves to be taxed. In a speech last month Buffett - the third richest man in the world - pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent of his income while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. 'Many of the new super-rich are looking long term at the world and they see a collapsing US education system and health-care system and the disappearance of the middle class and they realise: this is bad for everybody,' said Frank. Defenders of low tax for the very rich point to the theory of trickledown economics - the spending power of the rich benefiting the poor. But while the super-rich have boomed, the earning power of the average and poor citizen has not nearly matched the performance of the elite. In 2005 the top one per cent of earners in the US gained 14 per cent in income in real terms, while the rest of the country gained less than one per cent. The situation is especially bad for the severely poor - those living at half the poverty level - whose numbers are at a 32-year high. The rich are getting richer but are not bringing everyone else with them. 'If you look at the impact of the last 20 years it seems pretty clear that trickledown just does not work,' said Paul Buchheit, economics professor at Chicago's Harold Washington College. There are some signs of a change in attitude. Recent huge Wall Street flotations such as the listing of private equity giants like Blackstone have created a push in Congress for taxes on the instant billionaires they have created. Scandals of excess such as Enron and WorldCom and the trial of Conrad Black have been high-profile. But few politicians, needing campaign cash from new millionaires, will get far preaching higher tax. Calls for more equality tend to have come from men like Buffett and Gates whose fortunes are so enormous that a little extra tax would make no difference. Bush has pushed to phase out taxes like the estate tax, which benefit only the rich. 'I don't see it changing. No matter what administration is in power,' said Buchheit. But many think it must change. To a large degree, the debate over the booming lives of the super-rich is an argument about the American soul. It is a country that has always worshipped wealth, where the creation of a fortune was seen as virtuous and a source of pride. But now that huge wealth has started to squeeze the 'middle class' out of existence, leaving the haves and have-nots in very separate worlds. It is possible that political will may develop to address the problem or that the problem will correct itself. The notorious end of the Gilded Age came in the panic of 1893 that sank America into depression. Frank believes the signs of a coming storm are there. 'The trick is to spot when prosperity turns to excess,' he said. 'When a large amount of people make a lot money very quickly it's a sign you are near the top of the market.' In a world of mega-yachts, private submarines and space hotels, that peak might be close at hand. And it's a long way down. Billionaire's row · There are 7.5 million households in America worth up to $10m. A further two million are worth $10m-$100m and thousands are worth more than $100m. · There is now a two-year waiting list for 200ft yachts. If put end to end, the boats on that list, which cost $50m each, would be 15 miles long. · Sebonack Golf Club in the Hamptons, Long Island, charges $650,000 for membership. That doesn't include the $12,000 annual dues, or tips for caddies. · Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a private Boeing 767. · John D. Rockefeller was America's first billionaire. Adjusted for inflation, he had $14bn - less than the net worth of each of Sam Walton's five children today. There were 13 US billionaires in 1985. Now there are more than 1,000. There are as many millionaires in North Carolina as in India. · 'Affluent' is Richistani for 'not really rich'. According to Frank, you need about $10m to be considered entry-level rich.

Diet Coke and mentos

Indian Thriller

On The Map with Avi Lewis: Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Islamophobia

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The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

Amazon.co.uk Review
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times

Synopsis
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

From the Publisher
Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original - The Times

About the Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. His works include A Wild Sheep Chase; The Elephant Vanishes; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood; Dance Dance Dance; South of the Border, West of the Sun; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; Sputnik Sweetheart; Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche; after the quake and Birthday Stories.

Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade

by James Reston

The story of the Third Crusade, and the two men who dictated its outcome: Saladin, hero of the Islamic world and Richard the Lionheart. Richard and the King of France led a European army of several hundred thousand warriors, but Saladin's manoeuvres resulted in the crusaders retreat and the demise of the Third Crusade.

Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams (Paperback)

by Paul Martin (Author)

Amazon.co.uk Review
A good kip, a nice nap, forty winks--we all know how agreeable it is to hit the hay. In Counting Sheep, Cambridge scientist Paul Martin, onetime Director of Communication at the Cabinet Office, analyses quite why sleep is so biologically and psychologically rewarding.

The book is divided into seven sections, with titles like "Preliminaries, Mechanisms and Origins". Using this scaffolding Martin confidently builds his thesis, that sleep is an adaptation for resting the weary body, which Homo sapiens has since cannily put to other uses (like dreaming).

But this is no dry Darwinian text. Martin is a plausible and highly engaging writer who has a gift for the telling anecdote: witness the Empress of Russia who employed an old woman specifically to tickle her feet so as she could drop off, or the famous-but-sleepy pianist who could only be roused by his wife playing an unresolved chord. Other enlightening diversions take Martin through the pros and cons of hypnotics, sleepwalking, snoring, late night milky drinks, nightmares, fatigued politicos and bedmates. Every section is enlivened by lots of pithy and well-chosen quotes, like James Joyce's blissfully simple: "warm beds, warm full-blooded life".

The author concludes with a chapter on sleeping problems. Many people have trouble getting the right amount of kip from time to time, and Martin gives sage advice on the best sleep regimens and remedies. But you don't have to be a narcoleptic or an insomniac to enjoy Counting Sheep: almost anyone should find this perfect bedtime reading. --Sean Thomas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Sunday Times 21 July 2002
Just about everything you could possibly wish to know about sleep...Marvellous.

Sunday Telegraph 23 June 2002
A fascinating account of what happens during the dark third of our lives, the time with which we are so familiar but about which we know so little.

Evening Standard 17 June 2002
Energetic and immensely readable, this is as good a popular science book as I have read.

New Statesman 8 July 2002
A masterpiece of efficiently and entertainingly delivered information, bracingly clear and thoroughly researched.

Scotland on Sunday 23 June 2002
A thoroughly engaging and passionate book, littered with fascinating experiments, titillating examples and offbeat asides.

Book Description
A popular science book about the science and pleasures of sleep and dreams.

Synopsis
This an overview of that most vital, most underrated and most elusive of human activities, that draws on both cutting-edge neuroscience and classic literature. We spend one third of our lives asleep, but know hardly anything about it, and can remember so little of it as we come out of it. Why? This text seeks to answer questions such as: does sleeping keep us sane?; are dreams the place we go to resolve our problems, emasculate our fears and rehearse our hopes?; why are we paralysed when we dream?; why did sleep evolve?; and are we getting enough sleep?

From the Back Cover
To sleep, to dream: Paul Martin's Counting Sheep understands the centrality of these activities to all our lives, and can help you respect, and extract more pleasure from, that delicious time when you are lost to the world.

About the Author
Paul Martin studied biology at Cambridge, acquiring a First in Natural Sciences and a PhD in behavioural biology. He went to Stanford as a Harkness fellow and then to the School of Medicine as Postdoctoral Fellow, before lecturing and researching at Cambridge University. He is the co-author with Pat Bateson of Measuring Behaviour and Design for a Life. His first solo book was The Sickening Mind, which was shortlisted for the NCR Prize in 1997. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Power of Nightmares (1-6) Part 1 'Baby it's cold outside'

SEXYDROWNWATCH starring Borat

glumbert.com - SEXYDROWNWATCH starring Borat

Wolves

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee replied, "The one you feed."

Maritess vs. Superfriends

قصيدة الحزن

علمني حبك ..أن أحزن

و أنا محتاج منذ عصور

لامرأة تجعلني أحزن

لامرأة أبكي فوق ذراعيها مثل العصفور

لامرأة.. تجمع أجزائي

كشظايا البلور المكسور

***

علمني حبك سيدتي أسوء عادات

علمني أخرج من بيتي

في الليللة ألاف المرات..

و أجرب طب العطارين..

و أطرق باب العرافات..

علمني ..أخرج منبيتي..

لأمشط أرصفة الطرقات

و أطارد وجهك..

في الأمطار..

و في أضواء السيارات..

و أطارد ثوبك..

في أثواب المجهولات

و أطارد طيفك..

حتى..حتى..

في أوراق الإعلانات..

علمني حبك كيف أهيم على وجهي..ساعات

بحثا عن شعر غجري

تحسده كل الغجريات

بحثا عن وجه ٍ..عن صوتٍ..

هو كل الأوجه و الأصواتْ

***

أدخلني حبكِ.. سيدتي

مدن الأحزانْ..

و أنا من قبلكِ لم أدخلْ

مدنَ الأحزان..

لم أعرف أبداً..

أن الدمع هو الإنسان

أن الإنسان بلا حزنٍ

ذكرى إنسانْ..

***

علمني حبكِ..

أن أتصرف كالصبيانْ

أن أرسم وجهك بالطبشور على الحيطانْ..

و على أشرعة الصيادينَ

على الأجراس, على الصلبانْ

علمني حبكِ..كيف الحبُّ

يغير خارطة الأزمانْ..

علمني أني حين أحبُّ..

تكف الأرض عن الدورانْ

علمني حبك أشياءً..

ما كانت أبداً في الحسبانْ

فقرأت أقاصيصَ الأطفالِ..

دخلت قصور ملوك الجانْ

و حلمت بأن تزوجني

بنتُ السلطان..

بلك العيناها ..

أصفى من ماء الخلجانْ

تلك الشفتاها..

أشهى من زهر الرمانْ

و حلمت بأني أخطفها مثل الفرسانْ..

و حلمت بأني أهديها أطواق اللؤلؤ و المرجانْ..

علمني حبك يا سيدتي, ما الهذيانْ

علمني كيف يمر العمر..

و لا تأتي بنت السلطانْ..

***

علمني حبكِ..

كيف أحبك في كل الأشياءْ

في الشجر العاري, في الأوراق اليابسة الصفراءْ

في الجو الماطر.. في الأنواءْ..

في أصغر مقهى.. نشرب فيهِ..

مساءً..قهوتنا السوداءْ..

علمني حبك أن آوي..

لفنادقَ ليس لها أسماءْ

و كنائس ليس لها أسماءْ

و مقاهٍ ليس لها أسماءْ

علمني حبكِ..كيف الليلُ

يضخم أحزان الغرباءْ..

علمني..كيف أرى بيروتْ

إمرأة..طاغية الإغراءْ..

إمراةً..تلبس كل كل مساءْ

أجمل ما تملك من أزياءْ

و ترش العطرعلى نهديها

للبحارةِ..و الأمراء..

علمني حبك أن أبكي من غير بكاءْ

علمني كيف ينام الحزن

كغلام مقطوع القدمينْ..

في طرق (الروشة) و (الحمراء)..

علمني حبك أن أحزنْ..

و أمنا محتاج منذ عصور

لامرأة تجعلني أحزنْ..

لامرأة تجمع أجزائي..

كشظايا البلور المكسور..

With a Grain of Salt

By Mohamed Salmawy
First Published 6/15/2007

Absolute Freedom for All

I do not agree at all with those who claim — and they are many — that there is no freedom in Egypt. The truth is that we have never, throughout our seven-thousand-year history known the kind of freedom we now enjoy.

The press, for example, has come to enjoy absolute freedom to slander the highest-ranking officials and insult them however it pleases. It is also free to invent scandals around these officials whenever necessary.

In one newspaper I recently saw a headline that read “Ministers’ sex scandals,” pointing to a story in one of its inside pages. I was disappointed in the newspaper after reading the inside page, not because the report did not match up to its headline, but because it didn’t include any pictures — not even graphics of any sort.

Nevertheless, publishing such a headline, even unaccompanied by any story at all — which is often the case with many newspapers — is enough to rub it in the faces of those who doubt the freedom that the press enjoys nowadays.

However, freedom in Egypt is not — as those who doubt it claim — limited only to the press. It extends to political life as well. Any political group (eg the Muslim Brotherhood) can now function as a public political organization, with its own recognized leaders, members, policies and slogans.

The government’s respect for such a group has grown so much that it now acknowledges it by dealing with it on a daily basis in or out of the People’s Assembly, even if it (or its newspapers) have never recognized its name and refer to it simply by its legal description as “the banned group.”

This free environment has of course reflected on other aspects. The whole country now enjoys a rare case of absolute freedom. I have traveled almost all around the world, but I have never ever seen anything quite like this. Citizens can now walk in the middle of the street oblivious of the existence of any sidewalks. Landlords can now leave their buildings unpainted, red bricks exposed, without any legal penalties.

In Maadi, where I live, we were all surprised at a neighbor who actually annexed the sidewalk extending his own property and turning it into his own little garden. When the neighbors complained to the district officials, the officials showed utmost respect to the freedom of the resident, who had obviously ironed out the matter with them beforehand – hence they did nothing about it.. A few days later, three other neighbors on the same street practiced their own ‘ironed-out’ rights as well, and followed in their neighbor’s footsteps.

Another resident in the same area went ahead and built a kitchen without a license just below his neighbor’s bedroom. When the wronged neighbor, who was fed up of smelling the fried garlic and listening to the splash of mulukhia every time he entered his bedroom, took the matter to court our deficient legal system did not recognize this newly-found freedom. It ordered the immediate demolition of the kitchen and slapped the perpetrator with a one-year prison sentence.

Strangely enough the verdict was never carried out because — believe it or not — demolition orders can now never be executed without the approval of the police.

The entire society, I say, now enjoys absolute freedom. That includes the government as well, which now feels free to turn a deaf ear to any criticism of its policies whether in the press or in parliament. Ministers don’t even bother to attend the parliament interpellations.

Furthermore, ministers — or at least some of them who belong to the NDP’s Policy Secretariat — can now reject any decision by the prime minister himself or refuse to carry out public government policy if they so choose.

Last year, in the prime minister’s office I was witness together with all 30 members of the Board of the Writers’ Union to a decree issued by the prime minister granting financial subsidy to the union towards setting up a much-needed pension fund for Egyptian writers. But the finance minister, who can’t stand the word “subsidy,” a dirty word in the IMF dictionary, refuses so far to carry out the prime minister’s decree, thus asserting his undeniable freedom.

For the same way the press, or members of political groups can do what they want, ministers too can now also do what they want — and so does the police.

Where else in the world can you find such absolute freedom?!

Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Writer’s Union of Egypt and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo. This article is syndicated in the Arabic press.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Official Trailer 1

The Story of My Life

i was ready to tell
the story of my life
but the ripple of tears
and the agony of my heart
wouldn't let me
i began to stutter
saying a word here and there
and all along i felt
as tender as a crystal
ready to be shattered
in this stormy sea
we call life
all the big ships
come apart
board by board
how can i survive
riding a lonely
little boat
with no oars
and no arms
my boat did finally break
by the waves
and i broke free
as i tied myself
to a single board
though the panic is gone
i am now offended
why should i be so helpless
rising with one wave
and falling with the next
i don't know
if i am
nonexistence
while i exist
but i know for sure
when i am
i am not
but
when i am not
then i am
now how can i be
a skeptic
about the
resurrection and
coming to life again
since in this world
i have many times
like my own imagination
died and
been born again
that is why
after a long agonizing life
as a hunter
i finally let go and got
hunted down and became free

-Rumi

I Saw Goodness Getting Drunk

I am gone,
lost any sense of wanting the wine
of the nowhereness ask me,
I don't know where I am.
At times I plunge
to the bottom of the sea,
at times, rise up
like the Sun.

At times, the universe is pregnant by me,
at times I give birth to it.
The milestone in my life
is the nowhereness,
I don't fit anywhere else.
This is me:
a rogue and a drunkard,
easy to spot
in the tavern of Lovers.
I am the one shouting hey ha.

They ask me why I don't
behave myself.
I say, when you
reveal your true nature,
then I will act my age.

Last night, I saw Goodness getting drunk.
He growled and said,
I am a nuisance, a nuisance.
A hundred souls cried out, but
we are yours, we are yours, we are yours.
You are the light
that spoke to Moses and said
I am God, I am God, I am God.
I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you?
He said, I am you, I am you, I am you.

-Rumi

Inside the minds of killer doctors

Some of the accused behind the recent terror plots in Britain were professional healers. What on earth prompts someone to snap from caregiver to killer?

By Juan Cole

Jul. 09, 2007 | Counterterrorism officials have expressed astonishment that physicians and medical personnel appear to have been behind the recent terror plots involving car bombs in Britain. Physicians swear the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and are in a caring profession aimed at healing, not killing. This puzzlement, however, betrays a lack of understanding of how members of small terrorist cells think and what motivates them. How, indeed, could a physician plan to inflict mayhem and lethal violence on club-goers or airline passengers?

Last Tuesday, a former Muslim militant, Shiraz Maher, dropped a bombshell in an interview on the BBC's "Newsnight," saying he had known one of the alleged perpetrators, Dr. Bilal Abdullah, a Sunni Iraqi, when Abdullah was at Cambridge. Dr. Abdullah, he said, "actively cheered the deaths of British and American troops in Iraq." From an elite Sunni medical family, born in the U.K. but raised in Baghdad, Abdullah attended the upscale al-Mansour high school and Baghdad College. Abdullah's family and friends have been targeted by Shiites in the past, according to recent news reports, although Abdullah reportedly had converted to the radical Salafi Jihadi form of Sunnism even before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. He is alleged to have hated Shiites, whom he considered apostates. He is also said to have come under the influence, while in Iraq, of the Sunni fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaisi, of the Association of Muslim Scholars.

Although not all the suspects so far detained in the attacks may be presumed guilty, Dr. Abdullah was arrested at the scene, on fire. He likely believed that Britain and the U.S. were responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq -- though this is a gross simplification of a complex war -- and that the imperial powers had fatally marginalized Iraq's formerly dominant Sunni Arabs in favor of Iran-linked Shiites and separatist Kurds.

Abdullah's actions are consistent with the research findings of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who found that most suicide bombers are protesting what they see as the humiliating occupation of their country by a foreign military. He theorized that the bombings are intended to affect public opinion, and so to bring about changes in political attitudes in the occupying country toward the occupiers. Although the other alleged cell members are not Iraqis, they would have agreed that a key region of the Muslim world is occupied by Western troops, and felt similar outrage. At least one of the other plotters is thought to be from a Palestinian family displaced to Jordan by the rise of Israel, another source of anger in the Muslim world over occupation of Arab land.

Yet, the actions of the group in Britain were too erratic and error-prone to be the result of careful political planning. And the self-immolation by some of them raises questions as to their deeper mind-set. Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer has called this way of thinking "cosmic war." Small terrorist cells arise in part because their members develop a specific way of looking at the world, which they reinforce for one another in everyday interactions. As the group becomes more and more distinct in its views from the society around it -- and more isolated -- its members can cross boundaries of reason and human sentiment, becoming monstrous.

For caring professions to produce terrorists is hardly unprecedented. Israeli-American Dr. Baruch Goldstein carried out the 1994 massacre of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron, killing 29 persons at the Ibrahimi Mosque and wounding another 150. The No. 2 man in al-Qaida, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri from the elite Azzam family, trained as a physician in Cairo in the 1970s.

Paul J. Hill, who shot down abortion clinic physician Dr. John Britton in 1994 in Florida, was a formally trained clergyman who started out committed to helping people spiritually, not killing them. He became so overwrought about what he considered genocide inflicted on the unborn, however, that he felt compelled to save innocents by killing Dr. Britton. The reverend reflected, chillingly, afterward, "If I wounded him, just shot him in the leg or shoulder, I knew there was an excellent probability that he would return to killing innocent children. In my thinking it just became: I had to kill him."

Becoming a religious terrorist depends on several steps. The first is conversion to a way of thinking by which the perpetrators identify with a core group that they wish to protect, but which they believe is being subjected to great harm. Typically this group is imagined to be composed of innocents or lonely carriers of divine truth, whose existence is both essential and yet precarious.

The second is the naming of the malevolent force that is harming these pure ones. The so-called Christian Identity Movement in Oklahoma, to which terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had links, posits that the U.S. government is persecuting the vanishing band of Anglo-Saxon Christians, the pure lost tribe of Israel, on behalf of polyglot minorities. This belief appears to have been among the motivations for the two to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

The question for true believers thus becomes how to safeguard the righteous innocents from being wiped out by the forces of darkness. Some choose peaceful paths to that goal. If they simply organize protests or join political parties, they become social activists.

But a key motivation for the turn to terror is a sense of extreme urgency. If the true believers are convinced that an occupying force or government is committing daily mass murder, and simply cannot bear for it to continue, they may feel an impulse to do something immediate and dramatic. Hothouse conversations with a select group of like-minded believers can reinforce and multiply this feeling. Dr. Abdullah was seen by his co-workers at his hospital as a slacker who spent all his time surfing Muslim fundamentalist Web sites. If their description is accurate, it seems likely that he was increasingly obsessed with the alleged British and American threat to Sunni Islam.

Activists who become terrorists often view themselves as soldiers in God's army. Seeing all British citizens unsympathetic to the Salafi Jihadi cause as soldiers in an opposing army authorized the terrorists, in their own minds, to target civilians in the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. Their intended victims were not simply late-night revelers in the mind of the would-be attackers, but rather enemy troops on rest and recreation.

Such perpetrators can also be impelled to act by a fear of imminent capture, since in their view this would spell the final victory of the forces of evil over the elect few. After the People's Temple group killed California Rep. Leo Ryan in Guyana in 1978 they were forced by their leader, Jim Jones, to commit mass suicide because Jones realized that this murder would lead to the destruction of their group, which he felt was alone in carrying the truth. Jones began as a pastor in a mainstream church and had at one point been a civil rights leader in Indiana -- a dramatic example of how caring individuals can go wrong.

It is likely, then, that Dr. Abdullah's group attacked Glasgow Airport in such an amateurish way out of panic, knowing that their botched operation in Haymarket, London, a few days before would likely lead to their arrest. Authorities have found a suicide note, and collective suicide appears to have been as important to them as damaging the airport or killing passengers.

The Glasgow Airport bombing underlines how the Iraq war is not, as President George W. Bush argues, quelling terror, but rather is generating it. How much Iraq-focused terrorism was there in the U.K. before 2003? The earlier Madrid and London Underground bombings were driven by the same motivation. That said, it must be underlined that in British society these individuals had access to peaceful means of expressing dissent and their views of policy. Moreover, most Britons already want their troops out of Iraq -- and so might even have given them a sympathetic hearing if they had not lashed out in irrational rage. And the tragic war in Iraq is not only being fought by British and American troops: Salafi Jihadi guerrilla cells, which may be inspired by preachers like Abdullah's mentor, Sheikh al-Kubaisi, routinely kill dozens of innocent Shiite Iraqis, and have also targeted Kurds and secular or tribal Sunni Arabs. Most Iraqis do not want the Salafi "Islamic state," of which Abdullah dreams.

Ironically, Abdullah and his group have possibly hindered any near-term withdrawal of British troops from Iraq -- if any such logical goal can be attributed as their aim -- since the new Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not want to be seen as bowing to coercion by terrorists. Dr. Bilal Abdullah violated his oath as a physician because he cared too obsessively about the putative welfare of some, and cared not at all about that of others.

-- By Juan Cole

Banishing the Ghosts of Iran

By FATEMEH KESHAVARZ

The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest around the Western world. To many Americans, it is but one more sign that Iran, in particular, and the Muslim Middle East, in general, are inhospitable to women and to freethinkers. For some years, America's popular reading list has bolstered that view, ignoring political complexities of the region in favor of a simple narrative.

Best sellers like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003), Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003), and Åsne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown, 2003) have enforced and embellished the one-sided picture of Middle Eastern culture. Call it the "New Orientalism."

In the 1970s, Edward W. Said's influential Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) offered a decisive critique of entrenched Western assumptions that construed Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic" and "inscrutable" Orient deviates. Not infallible — but certainly profound and engaging — Said's views fired the imagination of such influential scholars as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, now central to postcolonial and subaltern studies.

But a new version of earlier assumptions pervades our culture today. The old European Orientalist writers of the 18th through the 20th centuries treated Middle Eastern culture and people as having been great in the remote past, but devoid of complexity and agency in the present. The New Orientalists don't improve on that. Whether it is Nafisi's women reading Western literature in postrevolutionary Iran, a brave bookseller smuggling works into Seierstad's Taliban-run Kabul, or Amir's guilt at tolerating the rape and repression of his kite-runner friend in Hosseini's book, they all reduce the cavernous and complicated story of the region into "us" and "them" scenarios.

Make no mistake. We should protest the incarceration of any academic anywhere in the world who gets caught in the crossfire of political games. We all wish Esfandiari to be freed, but the danger is that we will color all of Iran, the country in which I was born and whose contemporary literature and culture are a delight to teach, with such actions. If we do, we will give less, not more, aid to the many intellectuals, scholars, and writers who, little known in the United States, make up a vibrant, multifaceted Iranian culture. Bottom line: Iran — like many other countries in the Middle East — is more than a country of victims and villains. It has much to offer the world.

What makes the old Orientalism and its newer version effective is that their sinister plots build on each other — and gradually seep into our daily accumulated fears. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), the sociologist Avery F. Gordon explains that ghost stories are accounts of phantoms that disturb the reader with their overpowering presence. And yet their most distinct feature is that they are absent from view. Ghosts haunt us by not being there. And the New Orientalist literature has been producing ghosts in abundance. Muslim ghosts are large in number and perfectly wicked, suitable qualities for generating fear. They are old, so their past supplies material for nightmarish rereadings of history.

The memoirs, travel accounts, novels, and journalistic writings whose popular domain is haunted by Muslim ghosts vary in quality. Thematically, they stay focused on the public phobia: blind faith and cruelty, political underdevelopment, and women's social and sexual repression. They provide a mix of fear and intrigue — the basis for a blank check for the use of force in the region and Western self-affirmation. Perhaps not all the authors intend to sound the trumpet of war. But the divided, black-and-white world they hold before the reader leaves little room for anything other than surrender to the inevitability of conflict between the West and the Middle East.

An example is Nafisi, a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, whose memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran I use to analyze the New Orientalist approach in my book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In the memoir, the professor of literature who is the book's narrator brings other women into her home to read Western classics. Outside the reading group, the author is angered by the preference that a male Muslim student exhibits for the protagonist in Maksim Gorky's Mother over Jane Austen's female characters. She says to Mr. Nahvi, the archvillain: "I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure — you are as different as man and mouse." The "good" professor, who appreciates Austen and Western characters, and the "bad" Iranian of today, who dislikes them, appear to be locked in eternal fight. What about the vast range of other Iranians who fall somewhere in between?

Reading Lolita in Tehran banishes what it cannot deal with. For example, it celebrates the power of literature for the women who gather to read the forbidden texts (although it would not have to have been as secretly as the book suggests) as evidence of women's resilience in the face of a revived patriarchy in post-1979 Iran. The least the book could do would be to mention a few contemporary Iranian women writers. It makes no such reference. The reader will not know that at the time this memoir was written, such prominent Iranian women writers as Shahrnush Parsipur, Simin Danishvar, Moniru Ravanipur, and Simin Behbahani, to mention only a few, captured the imagination of readers and made it to the best-seller list in Iran. In Reading Lolita in Tehran's narration of postrevolutionary Iran, such complex and towering Iranian women do not exist.

Further, despite favoring democratization of the Middle East, ghost stories refrain from addressing repression when conducted by the United States (for example, the toppling of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Iranian premier, with the help of the CIA in the early 1950s, or the behavior of governments deemed allies of the United States toward their own citizens). Indeed, the way this literature navigates its way through the Middle Eastern mess without running into the U. S. presence there is astounding. Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, makes no reference to the coup ousting Mosaddeq, despite highlighting the anti-American orientation of the 1979 revolution that was widely understood to be fostered by the CIA's role in the coup. Neither is there any mention of chemical and other weapons used on Iranians and Kurds, with no objections at the time from Western democracies, during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

At the low end of the scale, the New Orientalist narrative not only draws on the ghosts of our fears but also harbors grotesque errors and generalizations bordering on the absurd. In Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Anchor Books, 1995), the prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks turns into a linguist. Commenting on the "tribal" connections among the roots of Arabic words, Brooks suggests that the word for "mother" has a common root with words that mean many things, including "stupid," "illiterate," "parasite," and "without opinion." A larger outcome of that supposed linguistic ambivalence is said to be ignorance of religion, because "the nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable."

Irshad Manji, a Canadian television host and author, plays social scientist and historian in The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (St. Martin's Press, 2004), finding one of "the troubles with Islam today" to be the way it distorts history. "Growing up," Manji writes, she never "heard Abraham's name in a history lesson." Elsewhere she indicates that Muslims are not allowed to think for themselves, but only to imitate the behavior of the prophet.

The verdict — extended to more than a billion Muslims — is based partly on a report published by the religious academy in Manji's town that suggests that Muslims view the prophet as a perfect example. The author deals with specialized topics such as the chronology of the Koran in equally simplistic ways, assuming that since she cannot understand it, no other Muslim does. From that she argues that ignorance about the Koran leads to global tragedy. Had Mohamed Atta known that the hur promised to him by the Koran could refer to "white raisins" and not "dark-eyed virgins," the September 11 tragedy might have been avoided. From Manji's perspective, trying to understand political conflict, extremism, or injustice is unnecessary.

Don't hold your breath, either, for the "scholarly" versions of the New Orientalist discourse. They replicate the disturbing features of their popular counterparts. Bernard Lewis's recent work What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2002) lumps together the entire Muslim Middle East as "a culture" in turmoil in order to contrast it with Christian Europe as the epitome of progress. Generally speaking, Lewis, a well-known scholar of Near Eastern studies, is hostile to his subject: the modern Middle Eastern Muslim. Omid Safi, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, counts, in an essay in the fifth volume of Voices of Islam (Praeger Publishers, 2007), 14 demeaning qualifiers, such as "poor," "weak," "ignorant," "humiliating," "corrupt," "impoverished," "weary," and "shabby," on one page. The menacing tone of Lewis's discourse, perpetuated in his punitive narrating voice, scolds Muslim subjects at every turn for their "fall" from glory. At the same time, while their supposed rage, ignorance, and incompetence are made hypervisible, a kind of background noise setting the ghostly ambience, they rarely speak for themselves. The absence of Muslim voices and commentators comes across as a natural function of their lack of dynamism and agency.

With Muslim women, matters are even simpler. Silenced twice (by local culture and by Western narrative), Muslim women are elusive subjects in many Western histories of the Middle East. Historians make an effort to seek them in documents that capture smaller moments of personal exchange, like court records; deeds of charitable foundations, called waqf, that they owned; or biographical sources on transmitters of sayings of the prophet, called hadith. More often, in their flowing black chadors and locked inside a proverbial harem, women are favorite candidates to be made hypervisible and yet totally masked: perfect ghosts. Lewis, for example, cites their low status in the Muslim world as "probably the most profound single difference between the two civilizations." Legally, he places them categorically below the unbelievers and slaves. Members of the other two groups can improve their status, but women will always be women.

Lewis documents the plight of women through uninformed comments of a handful of men about a handful of other men. There is Evliya Çelebi, the 17th-century Ottoman traveler who expressed surprise that the Austrian emperor stopped his horse on the street to let a woman pass. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, in his opera Aida, told the story of the Egyptian Radames, torn between his love for the Egyptian princess Amneris and the Ethiopian slave Aida. To Verdi, a European Christian, Radames had to face the tragedy of choosing between the two women. What he didn't understand, says Lewis, is that his Egyptian hero would not have been faced with a problem: He could have possessed both women. Lewis also gives us the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who blamed the deposed shah for women's immodest clothing and social activities. Such comments "document" the backward social status of the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Iranian women. The women themselves are not quoted and discussed.

Lewis closes with prescribing for the ghost a dose of the liberty enjoyed by those "schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom." The list of recommended freedoms is long, but it does not include the one on the minds of Middle Easterners these days: freedom from military intrusion.

As in many other places in the Middle East, in Iran new and less-known players appear on the scene if today's culture is allowed to come into full view. Again, the case of women is instructive. Shahrnush Parsipur, born in 1946, is a powerful postrevolutionary author of many successful novels, including The Dog and the Long Winter (1976) and Tuba and the Meaning of the Night (1989). Parsipur is also the author of Women Without Men: A Novella, which she composed after the 1979 revolution and which Syracuse University Press translated in 1998. I purchased the latter two novels in Iran last summer, although they are supposedly "banned." In Women Without Men, she gives us Zarrinkolah, the charming prostitute. Shortly after the onset of the revolution, Parsipur's women are out to "see the world," and no one is going to stop them. When Zarrinkolah, a "little woman of 26 with a heart open like the sea," decides to leave the brothel, she needs no one's permission, no blessing from a holy man. She is her own source of holiness, the ray of light that brightens the brothel's miserable life. A holy prostitute in postrevolutionary Iran has to be a miracle, you say. But that is exactly the point. Postrevolutionary Iran has towering women writers who make miracles possible. Parsipur has since left for exile in the United States. But her books still have an enormous following that cannot simply be dropped from the picture of Iranian history and contemporary cultural life. Iranian women have figures like her to look to for a sense of empowerment.

Parsipur is one of many. A few decades before the revolution, and before Parsipur's generation made its presence felt, Simin Danishvar — born in 1921 and still living in Iran — had captured the imagination of thousands of Iranian readers. Her beautifully crafted novel Savushun takes place in the historic city of Shiraz in southwestern Iran. It follows the life of a Persian family confronting change during World War II, through the eyes of a young wife and mother. It is one of Iran's all-time best sellers.

An equally powerful poetic voice in 20th-century Iran is that of Simin Behbahani, born in 1927 and affectionately known to her followers as the lioness of Iran. A major literary figure before and after the revolution, she is also known for her activism and outspoken dedication to women's rights. She is currently president of the Iranian Writers' Association. During the Iran-Iraq war, Behbahani wrote passionately in favor of finding a peaceful solution to the conflict. In 1997 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Many of these writers view themselves as citizens of the world, and they have identities that are hybrid. Such identities are part of our evolving global society, which demands new ways of knowing and writing about one another: as a kaleidoscope of colors, accents, and vantage points. Unless we learn about less-explored cultures, those colors and vantage points will remain beyond our reach. Few Western readers and scholars would look up the exquisite poetry of the prominent 20th-century Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died in 1967, in a bookstore, or include her work in a world-literature or gender-studies course. It has to grow roots and bloom in the culture before the seeds are carried to new gardens.

Farrokhzad's beautifully crafted poem "Frontier Walls" is her poetic manifesto, her philosophy of life. In the light of the candle she carries, she and readers leave behind the walls that separate them and see the wholeness of human experience:

Return with me to that star,
Return with me
To that star far away
from the frozen seasons of the earth and its
ways to measure and understand
Where no one fears light.

Return with me
To the start of creation
To the fragrant core of a fertilized egg
To the moment I was born from you
Return with me, you have left me incomplete.

Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian language and comparative literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).